At 4-8, last year’s record may not be gaudy. But Escalante football coach Carlos Casados sees it as a great boost for this year.
“We have a real seasoned team coming back from last season,” he said, noting the team only lost two seniors. “So all the guys we have coming back have a lot of experience. We have the experience under our belt and we’re real hungry. As long as we stay healthy, we’re planning on having a good year.”
As a No. 10 seed, the Lobos beat Menaul 38-14 in the opening round before running into the combined Fort Sumner/House team in Escalante’s first season in eight-man football.
“So this year, they know how the game is played,” Casados said. “They’re ready for what these teams are going to throw at them. It’s a lot faster pace than 11-man. Obviously, there’s a lot more room for error when it comes to eight-man because there are fewer players on the field. If you miss an open-field tackle, it could end up costing you a 60-yard TD run. All players have to do their part.”
This season, though, the Lobos are stacked and ready to do just that.
“We’re fast,” Casados said. “We’re not big. We don’t have a lot of size, but we’re fast off the ball and we adopted a new offense this summer. These guys have worked five days a week all summer long, and now they’re running it really smooth. It’s going to be hard for a defense to adjust from our running game to our passing game.”
The Lobos will looking for senior quarterback/defensiveback Braylon Emery (5’9”, 140 lbs.) to control the offense and make the correct reads as he enters the season as the starter under center for the first time, although he did see time as quarterback the past two seasons because of injuries.
“The pace. It was so much quicker than I thought it was going to be,” he said of the transition to eight-man. “And we had to get used to not having such a wide field. But we learned after the regular season, it’s time to really lock in. You can’t take anything for granted. You have to execute 100-percent of the time.”
Senior tightend Jerome Montoya, (5’10”, 150 lbs.); senior runningback/defensive end Damien Baeza (5’10”, 160 lbs.), offensive/defensive lineman Joel Valdez (5’10”, 170 lbs.) and senior offensive/defensive lineman Joe Cordova, (5’10”, 170 lbs.) are other impact players that Casados expects will play a big role in the season.
And the players have high expectations for themselves this season.
“I think we’re going to do pretty good,” Montoya said. “Make the playoffs. Hopefully to win another playoff game and move on. Eight-man is way different. It’s something else. It was pretty hard at the beginning, but midway through the season, it was kind of normal for us.”
The team is using the Fort Sumner loss as motivation for this season, Baeza said.
“We expect to win a state championship,” he said. “And just getting better every day and improving every day. We need to know to always expect a team to be at their fullest and always be ready for anything. We’ve prepared and we watched a lot of film. We’ve been in the weight room a lot more than we have in previous years. So we’re coming together as a team and reunited as a team.”